Submit Comments to House Committee

We strongly encourage you to submit your written comments to the committee via the House Public Comment portal. Please note that the comment field is limited to 3,000 characters.

Suggested Bullet Points to Include in Your Legislative Letter
NEW:  Here is the Sierra Club blog for your reference on other bullet points you might want to include:
https://www.sierraclub.org/texas/blog/2026/06/texas-house-committee-natural-resources-will-meet-discuss-data-centers-june-23
 

How to Participate in the Hearing

The hearing will take place on June 23 at 10 a.m. in Room E2.036 of the Capitol Extension. The public notice of this hearing can be found here.

If you plan to testify, you will need to register on-site using the witness registration kiosk located near the room. Once the public comment is open, witnesses are typically called in the order they register and will have 2 minutes to provide their comments.

The committee will accept oral testimony only from individuals attending the hearing in person. If you’re unable to attend but would like to watch the hearing, you can do so using this link.

ACTION #2

Go to the City of Fort Worth data center survey page here and submit comments!

 Below is an example for you to use in making your comments.

"The City should implement a one-year moratorium on all data center development until the city contracts out a detailed study on the adverse impacts. The study the city conducted took about 2-3 weeks and glosses over the real impacts. Ultimately, the City should actually ban new data centers within the city limits. There may be minor economic benefits, but the adverse impacts far outweigh the benefits. In fact, most modern-day AI data centers (referred to as "hyper-scale") only employ 25-50 people, which is not worth the tax breaks and impacts.

Zoning: the proposed 250 ft setback from residential is a joke. That's only the width of 7 average city streets. The proposed 300 ft setback for generators is also a joke. The toxic air emissions know no bounds. The proposed vegetation buffer does nothing to stop the air emissions from the generators or block the view. Also, it does not mitigation the heat island effect from these massive buildings.

Water Use: Cost per gallon used should be 10-20 times the residential/retail cost. Closed loop systems may "save" water, but to actually work, these close loop systems not only rely on water, but PFAS Glycol (Ethylene or Propylene). Therefore, when the system is flushed, PFAS and glycol and other toxic chemicals are released into the environment. Will the rules require treating before flushing? Once PFAS and glycol are released into the local stream, it leads to reproductive and immune system health risks and harms aquatic life. So, is the closed loop system the savior of data centers, of course not!

While the benefits of AI data centers are being questioned, the environmental impacts are known.  They are large immense buildings that use massive amounts of water and electricity, contain PFAS and other chemicals to keep the system cool, require thousands of acres of otherwise useful or natural land, pull massive amounts of power from the grid, create the heat island effect, & remove massive amounts of vegetation and habitat while only employing minimal number of people. Again, possibly minor economic benefits while causing such environmental harm. No hyper-scale data centers!"